Maybe its not Vinyl vs CD, but Analog vs Digital

[Mandolin Picker]

Ok, I found this article over at Ars Technica. It has absolutely nothing to do with music. It has everything to do with new cars vs old cars, or analog vs digital. There are a lot of advantages to all of the digital enhancements in automobiles today. But for pure driving pleasure, the author of the article found the older, more analog car was the one that brought the most satisfaction. He found he was more involved, and he actually had to drive a car. That made the experience more worthwhile. Maybe that’s the same thing in the vinyl vs digital music. Maybe its not about the sound difference, or the compression, or the warmth. Digital is easier, but analog (vinyl) gets you more of involved, and that improves your music experience.

 

If interested, here's the link to the article at Ars Technica, "How much tech is too much tech in our cars? Analog vs. digital driving." http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/04/how-much-tech-is-too-much-tech-in-our-cars-analog-vs-digital-driving/

 

 

[MikeRivers]

Naw . . When they only had phonograph records, there were a lot fewer of them being made than today's digital recordings, and they were made with more care. Nearly everything we heard was filtered (maybe "vetted" is the politically correct word) and whatever the genre, we heard what people with pretty good taste thought was the best in the business.

 

Today we have quantity over quality, and ease of listening over knowing that many real people were involved before we had something to listen to.

 

If it still cost $50,000 to $500,000 to make a record, the ones that were available would be as good as they used to be, no matter what technology was used to record them.

[Anderton]

If it still cost $50,000 to $500,000 to make a record, the ones that were available would be as good as they used to be, no matter what technology was used to record them.

 

Interesting...I'd add that when records cost that much to make, musicians played together.

[blue2blue]

Driving a car and listening to music in one's home... sometimes I forget which I'm doing, they're so similar and use the same parts of the brain and body in so many of the same ways.

 

I drive an 'analog' car -- a 22 year old Corolla (it's got less than 90k miles; I bought it new in '94). I totally get why various panel displays as well as voice-and-sound user interfaces (parallel in some ways to talking on a hands free phone) take one's attention from where one is and one's immediate task of negotiating traffic (in a way that talking to a human IN the car does not). I've read about some of the research into why these supposedly 'convenient' UI's are actually counter productive -- and they make sense. A voice menu in a car requires the mind to create a separate 'virtual space' to operate in (the menu system) and distracts the user from his actual, physical environment.

 

That all makes perfect sense and, while some aspects may seem superficially 'non-intuitive' (hands free car systems are actually more dangerous than talking on a hand-held phone according to several studies), if one really explores the issues, I think it actually fits with carefully observed experience.

 

 

But, as my ironic intro suggested, piloting a car in traffic is a whole lot different than listening to music in one's home. I mean, there are virtually NO parallels or similarities that occur to me.

 

As someone whose first phonograph was acoustic (it did have an electric motor -- but no electric pickup, preamp, amp or speaker, just a resonator over the huge and heavy 78 rpm spike), I feel like I have a fairly broad perspective on issues of different sound media. I have (as I've often noted) ~1200 LPs, ~200 singles and 78's, ~500 CDs, and loads and loads of reel and cassette tapes. (I also owned a 4 track cartridge player that I installed in my first car.)

 

I can't imagine a better system than the now-proverbial 'celestial jukebox' of modern online streaming with a near-universal music library, high quality streams (and DLs for mobiles so they can be 'loaded' while on wi-fi connections instead of having music adding to one's data costs).

 

I love(d) my vinyl (and I still own it all and have no plans to get rid of the bulk of it -- though I may sell some of the more rare stuff one of these days) but, really, I put a LOT of work into playing music, religiously cleaning records and styli, carefully making sure that the tracking weight, alignment, and anti-skate calibration were right, replacing belts, cleaning drive surfaces, etc, and STILL hearing distortion and surface noise, even on some brand new, premium-priced discs. I remember driving myself nuts trying to get some discs to track without gobs of IM distortion -- going so far as to increase tone arm weight just to play certain records -- and in some cases only to find out that NO amount of weight would make them track properly. (And then there were some records where I thought the distortion was from the vinyl or my tracking of it -- only to find out decades later than even the masters that went to digital distro were distorted! Ah, you gotta love the music biz. So often, the labels just don't seem to care.)

 

 

And, yeah, I get the tea ceremony angle to playing vinyl. That's the kind of thing I told myself back when I was stuck with it.

 

But what I really liked to do was make 'party tapes.' That was a fairly expensive proposition in reel days, and that slowed me down, but when I finally broke down and bought a hi fi cassette player (you should pardon the expression hi fi), I did, indeed, make a long string of such 'party mix' tapes. (The fidelity was kind of depressing -- I despise the flutter implicit in the cassette format -- but my reel deck had been stolen a few years earlier and the cassette deck was a port in a storm. And I loved making those party mix tapes.)

 

I hated the first CD player I heard (the first Sony, wildly expensive) but within a few years I'd heard some that sounded good and I ended up buying an inexpensive (for the time) Philips/Magnavox well-liked by some audiophile rags, with a somewhat aggressive analog reco filter (better than alias, huh?) It still works last time I checked. A decade or so later, I bought a Panasonic with multibit oversampling that sounded a bit better/'open' at the high end (and, 20 years later, it's still my 'main' CD player -- except that it's not even hooked up to my playback rig anymore).

 

 

But when I discovered subscription streaming around 2004, after a bit of skepticism ("Why would I want to rent instead of buy?" was the first question that had popped into my mind when I heard about the new services just coming to market), and as the selection of available music greatly expanded (things were pretty spotty in the early days; I think I was saying I typically found 80% of what I wanted to listen to in streaming in those days), I settled in.

 

Still, for the first few years the fi was pretty middling -- 160 kbps WMA was what my first subscription service (I've used 7) had. (The WMA format certainly provided better quality than a similar bitrate mp3 -- I'd ballpark it as around the equiv of 192 kbps mp3.)

 

But then I was turned onto MOG, which had a very good selection and 320 kbps streams and I fell in love. The first desktop player (based on Flash) was generally very good. But the push was on to get past Flash and move into straight HTML5 -- and that was a very mixed bag. They really, really had to dumb down the HTML5 player, a big step backward. Worse, around that time Beats Electronics bought MOG and started trying to figure out how to make their own service.

 

Beats didn't do a very good job, at all. I was really excited -- but a bit fearful -- of what Beats would come up with -- but I never dreamed in a million years that their player and UI would be so utterly, utterly terrible.

 

And consumers spoke with their pocketbooks and feet. Where MOG had had about 550k subscribers, by the time Apple had bought Beats -- talking about how the utterly dreadful Beats Music was 'the future' of music, Beats Music was down to only around 300k users -- EVEN with all the hoopla and hype surrounding Apple's purchase of Beats.

 

So, after trying Beats (two extended trials due to my status as paid MOG subscriber) and being pretty much disgusted, I went looking. I'd already been on MusicMatch On Demand and then it was bought by Yahoo who more-or-less turned it into Yahoo Music Unlimited, which subsequently went the way of so many things Yahoo -- belly up), But they were nice enough to set up a transition to Rhapsody. The Rhapsody sound wasn't as high quality but they actually had a classical selection, largely missing in Yahoo and MM before it, but reasonable under MOG.

 

Spotify was already in business at that point -- but I knew they paid artists less than other services and had what some felt to be 'unwholesome' relationships with major labels (who had invested in Spot).

 

I kept looking. I'd tried Google Play Music when it first surfaced -- and was woefully underimpressed. But by this time it had been around for a few years and I decided to try again. There were some real awkward things -- the search engine at that time was pretty stunted [which, of course, really annoyed me, since, you know, Google, and all], and I didn't like the look at all.

 

But the queue management was pretty good and over the first 8 or 10 months I was there they rolled out some good improvements. The shuffle is good (although I'd love it if it had different sort options, hard-shuffle, soft-shuffle, and so on), the play-next feature is very useful (it accepts a track, a group of tracks or an album), and they greatly improved the search engine (so you can do 'complex/compund' searches like "cream warthog, " which will find "Pressed Rat and Warthog" by Cream, etc.

 

 

tl;dr: Overall, subscription streaming is my favorite way of listening to canned music so far.*

 

 

 

 

* Though I still have a soft spot for the wind-up Victrola. There's something kind of cool in thinking of how the artists sat/stood there singing and playing into collector horns that drove a needle in wax that was then used to create mass produced records with more or less the same pattern. There's something about a Victrola playing -- grinding away yet one more ephemeral layer of shellac -- that's like a window back into time. Yeah, for sure, a good digital restoration can provide higher fidelity from the same recording (after much careful work, anyhow) but, there's just something about the mechanical action, the lack of any electronics, that tinny, but somehow strangely 'live' sound under the static. And, best of all -- no Auto-Tune.

[onelife]

Interesting...I'd add that when records cost that much to make, musicians played together.

 

Yeah, those early Beatles 45s with the orange and yellow spiral labels actually contained excitement that was unleashed when the music played. It was the same excitement the lads created in the studio by playing together. They probably rehearsed until it "felt right" then rolled the tape.

 

[Phil O'Keefe]

 

Interesting...I'd add that when records cost that much to make, musicians played together.

 

To a degree... but not entirely. Most analog multitrack stuff (once we hit the 24 track era) was probably laid down as a unit for the rhythm tracks, but still utilized a ton of overdubs for things like extra sweetening parts, vocals, solos, etc.

 

I do agree that getting people to play together is a very important thing that can positively affect the way a record sounds and feels. Even in the DAW era, I still prefer getting at least the rhythm section tracked together as a unit.

[blue2blue]

 

To a degree... but not entirely. Most analog multitrack stuff (once we hit the 24 track era) was probably laid down as a unit for the rhythm tracks, but still utilized a ton of overdubs for things like extra sweetening parts, vocals, solos, etc.

 

I do agree that getting people to play together is a very important thing that can positively affect the way a record sounds and feels. Even in the DAW era, I still prefer getting at least the rhythm section tracked together as a unit.

That was certainly almost always my starting place, back when I was freelancing. Track the section, make sure the drums were right and there wasn't so much bleed we couldn't replace a bass or guitar without issue, and then add/fix as needed. But we'd also often track a scratch lead vocal, as well, at least when the other band members thought it would be helpful.

[Phil O'Keefe]

That was certainly almost always my starting place, back when I was freelancing. Track the section, make sure the drums were right and there wasn't so much bleed we couldn't replace a bass or guitar without issue, and then add/fix as needed. But we'd also often track a scratch lead vocal, as well, at least when the other band members thought it would be helpful.

 

I always lay down a scratch vocal too along with the rhythm section whenever possible. It helps keep everyone together, and it also helps later when you're trying to figure out if you're hearing the second or third verse. Plus it keeps the singer occupied while we're doing the basic tracking, which tends to help keep them out of trouble...

[blue2blue]

 

I always lay down a scratch vocal too along with the rhythm section whenever possible. It helps keep everyone together, and it also helps later when you're trying to figure out if you're hearing the second or third verse. Plus it keeps the singer occupied while we're doing the basic tracking, which tends to help keep them out of trouble...

Otherwise you have to assign an AE to keep the guy away from the drummer's GF.

 

[Phil O'Keefe]

Otherwise you have to assign an AE to keep the guy away from the drummer's GF.

 

Exactly... and the resulting fight always puts a damper on the session...

[blue2blue]

 

Exactly... and the resulting fight always puts a damper on the session...

Almost always. Every once in a great while it energizes things. Better, though, are fights between band members and elitist, know-it-all, I've-got-the-gold-I-make-the-rules producers. One time when I was grinding through the engineering of a punk comp (no assistant, super crappy studio -- and I never got paid), doing 4 and 5 bands a night, I stepped between the totally jailhouse lead singer of one somewhat infamous gutter punk band and the moneyman producer. I told him later that if I hadn't, the guy would have gutted him. And I think there was a pretty good chance of that. Good thing, on at least some levels, that I didn't know the jackass was going to stiff me on the engineering bill.

 

[Anderton]

 

To a degree... but not entirely. Most analog multitrack stuff (once we hit the 24 track era) was probably laid down as a unit for the rhythm tracks, but still utilized a ton of overdubs for things like extra sweetening parts, vocals, solos, etc.

 

I was thinking more of the earlier recordings, not after record companies got bought my multinational corporations. To which I would add, those recordings were often made long after the songs had been honed by months of playing on the road and the band being a well-oiled machine.

 

[thankyou]

Naw . . When they only had phonograph records, there were a lot fewer of them being made than today's digital recordings, and they were made with more care. Nearly everything we heard was filtered (maybe "vetted" is the politically correct word) and whatever the genre, we heard what people with pretty good taste thought was the best in the business.

 

Today we have quantity over quality, and ease of listening over knowing that many real people were involved before we had something to listen to.

 

If it still cost $50,000 to $500,000 to make a record, the ones that were available would be as good as they used to be, no matter what technology was used to record them.

 

Great observation. I had a customer who, with his son, bought and rebuilt/flipped/hopped-up imported cars for the young guys who used to drive American hot rods when I was that age.

 

He told me that he only bought cars with manual transmissions, saying, "The thieves can't drive 'em."

 

There are so many ways that technologies have made life easier and more convenient, but each of those things usually done with some (often little) effort years ago - rolling up the windows, pushing in the clutch, moving the shift lever, turning on the lights, opening the garage door (if you had one), regulating speed on the highway - all those little efforts added up. Driving is just one small part of life.

[Phil O'Keefe]

Almost always. Every once in a great while it energizes things. Better, though, are fights between band members and elitist, know-it-all, I've-got-the-gold-I-make-the-rules producers. One time when I was grinding through the engineering of a punk comp (no assistant, super crappy studio -- and I never got paid), doing 4 and 5 bands a night, I stepped between the totally jailhouse lead singer of one somewhat infamous gutter punk band and the moneyman producer. I told him later that if I hadn't, the guy would have gutted him. And I think there was a pretty good chance of that. Good thing, on at least some levels, that I didn't know the jackass was going to stiff me on the engineering bill.

 

No money, no masters. Period.

[blue2blue]

 

No money, no masters. Period.

Now you tell me.

 

Actually, I did withhold the master mix tapes -- but some stuff leaked out from quick mix cassettes! (And one band that used four such tracks on an album that was mostly recorded in a modern 24-track studio of the era instead of an $8/hr warehouse with a TASCAM 38 in it... LOL... and, though I got no money, the artist [who was a nice guy] made sure he got my full name spelled correctly into the credits and matched with those 4 hissy, warbly, distorted cassette quick mixes. ])

 

Anyhow, I should have known better, I suppose.

 

I'd worked a previous project [where the artists and I as producer picked the studio and engineer and that end of things went very well] and, not too long before I started dunning him on the punk comp, he was bragging about how that record had sold 25k copies and he was ordering another five. A while later, I checked with those guys and he never paid them a cent. No doubt he's in junk bonds now. That kind of guy.

[Phil O'Keefe]

The music industry is full of "that kind of guy" Blue. That's why "no money = no masters."